2. Keeping your tracks on track

Your station’s on air, but your listeners might just be expecting to hear more than that one song you uploaded earlier. Your media library is going to grow, and fast. You’ll need ways to manage it with ease.

Your media library should never be a crowded attic. Instead it should be a neatly labeled record shelf you can actually use.

In this guide, you’ll learn the core functionality for organising your media library in Radio Cult. Once you’re done with this help article, you’ll know:

1. What tags are and how to tag your media files, and
2. How to perform bulk actions on your media files.

Let’s get every track in its place on that record shelf.

What are tags

Tags in Radio Cult aren’t just labels - they’re one of the most powerful tools for keeping your station organised and making automation work for you.

Media organisation

Think of tags as a super-flexible filing system for your tracks. You can give any piece of media as many tags as you want, which makes it easy to:

• Filter and search your library,
• Group related files by genre, mood, show segment, or whatever else makes sense, and
• Find exactly what you need, even when your library’s overflowing.

Broadcast automation

Tags aren’t just for tidying up - they can also run your broadcasts for you. You can assign tags to playlists so that, when the playlist runs, your station will randomly pull and play matching media. This means you can skip the track-by-track curation. Just tag your media, link those tags to a playlist, and schedule it. Job done.

We’ll get into all the clever automation tricks tags can pull off in a later article though.

Creating your first tag

Now you know what tags are, it's time to get your toes wet and create your very first tag.

There’s actually more than one way to create a tag in Radio Cult. The method we’ll describe below is useful for demonstrating how tags interact with your media files.

1. On your computer, open Radio Cult.

2. Click the Media button in the top navigation bar to head to the Media page.

3. Click the Tags cell for a media file you want to add a tag to.

4. Click the Create tag button in the Tags dropdown.

5. Type the name of the tag.

6. Click the Confirm (tick icon) button.

Pat yourself on the back - you’ve just created your first tag. But with one more step to add your first tag to a media file, your back will be owed another pat.

Adding your first tag to a media file

A tag not assigned to any media files is like a label stuck on an empty shelf - it’s there, but it’s not helping you find anything.

Let’s change that

1. Click the tag (you just created in the previous section) in the Tags dropdown.

Nice! Your first media file has been tagged and now it’s time to cash in on that second back pat.

Searching media files by tag(s)

Using tags to search is like having a smart librarian who knows exactly which shelves hold the media files you want. Just select one or more tags, and boom - you get a filtered view showing only the tracks that live on those shelves.

Let’s see the tag(s) search functionality in action.

1. Click the Tag filter dropdown.

2. Select the tag(s) from the Tag filter dropdown.

That’s that - you should now be seeing every media track you’ve tagged with the selected tag.

If you want to clear the tag filter (or any other filter), click the Reset button.

Adding a tag to multiple media files

After reading the last section on adding a tag to a single media file, you can probably imagine how tedious it could be to repeat that process over and over for dozens of tracks. Nobody wants to spend their afternoon tagging one track at a time.

That’s where bulk tagging comes in. Instead of pulling each record off the shelf individually to stick the same label on it, you can grab the whole stack and tag them all in one go.

Select the tracks you want, choose your tag, and apply it. Just like that, your chosen label is stamped across the whole group - no repetitive clicking, no wasted time.

1. Select the track(s) you want to tag by clicking the file checkbox(es).

2. Click the Add tags button in the Bulk actions menu.

3. Click the tag(s) in the Tags dropdown.

Huzzah - you’ve now learnt how to tag multiple media files at the same time.

The other bulk actions we support

If it would be tedious to tag a track one at a time, then it would be no different adding a media file to a playlist one at a time.

So not only do we support bulk tagging of media files, we also provide these other bulk actions for you to manage your media library with ease:

• Adding multiple tracks to a playlist.
• Editing multiple tracks, and
• Deleting and force deleting multiple tracks.

Adding multiple tracks to a playlist

1. Repeat step 1 from the previous section i.e. select the media files you want to add to a playlist.

2. Click the Add to playlist button.

3. Click the playlist(s) in the Playlists dropdown.

Editing multiple tracks

1. Repeat step 1 from the previous section i.e. select the media files you want to edit.

2. Click the Edit button.

You can edit the following fields for the selected media files:

• Artwork,
• Artist,
• Album,
• ISRC, and
• Music label.

For each of these fields, you can edit them in the following ways:

• Provide a new value: this will update all the selected media files with the new value for the given field.
• Clear value: this will remove the existing values for the given field for all the selected media files.

3. Edit the selected media files.

4. Click the Update files button.

Deleting and force deleting multiple tracks

Deleting multiple tracks is straightforward. Normally, if any selected tracks are part of a playlist, you’ll see a warning before confirming deletion. Force deleting skips this step - no warnings, just immediate removal of the tracks from your account, whether or not they’re in a playlist.

1. Repeat step 1 from the previous section i.e. select the media files you want to delete.

2. Click the Delete button or the Force delete button.

3. Click the Delete media button.

If you clicked the Delete button and any of the selected tracks belong to a playlist, then you will also need to click the Delete anyway button.

Alrighty - with all that said you should now be able to keep your media library as tidy and organised as your heart desires.

Currently, your media library in all likelihood won’t be particularly overwhelming. But even if your station only broadcasts a single genre of music, the world has produced so much audio content that having a library of hundreds of tracks is more than likely. However, your new found knowledge of the above functionality should ensure that managing a media library of that size (or even bigger ones) is never a daunting task.

Your understanding of what Radio Cult has to offer your station has certainly grown. But there’s still more to go to get the most out of the platform. So click here to learn more.